The Honorable Paul C. Lo, Superior Court Judge, Merced County. Judge Lo came to this country at the age of eleven as a refugee from Laos. He received his bachelor’s degree in economics from the University of California at Davis in 1991 and his Juris-Doctorate from UCLA School of Law in 1994. 

In December 1994, he became the first person of Hmong descent to practice law in the State of California. Judge Lo practiced law for 19 years in the Central Valley before he was appointed by Governor Jerry Brown to the Merced County Superior Court as judge in December, 2013. Judge Lo’s appointment to the bench is the first for a Hmong-American in the United States. 

Among his many volunteer activities, Paul is a former elected member of the Merced City School District Board of Trustees, a former member of the UC Merced Foundation Board of Trustees, the founder and former president of the Southeast Asian-American Professionals Association (SEA-APA), a former board member of the Mercy Medical Center Merced Community Board of Trustees, and the former president of Hmong National Development, Inc., based in Washington D.C. Paul is also an ordained minister, pastoring a church in Merced, California.